The Story Behind This Week’s Best Sellers

The Greatest: You know who had a pretty good 2016? Simone Biles, that’s who. After winning four gold medals and a bronze in the Rio Olympics last summer, Biles — who already had 14 world championship medals to her name and who won’t turn 20 until March — was hailed as the greatest American gymnast of all time. “Who doesn’t want to fly in the air?” she asked Ebony magazine. “It’s kind of cool.” The Associated Press chose Biles as its female athlete of the year; Ebony included her on its Power 100 list; and her memoir, “Courage to Soar,” written with Michelle Burford, hit No. 1 on the young adult hardcover best-seller list. (After seven weeks, it’s currently No. 4.) Not that she has let the success go to her head. “To me, I’m just normal,” she told The Financial Times last month, in a profile that started this way: “Simone Biles, arguably the greatest female gymnast of all time, is doing her best to convince me that she is an ordinary mortal, just like the rest of us. And it is nearly working. Sort of.”

In her memoir, Biles again passes herself off as normal, maintaining her good-natured humility and emphasizing the challenges she faced: early years in foster care (she was eventually adopted by her grandparents), struggles on the uneven bars and the realization that she would just miss the age cutoff for the 2012 Olympics. She quotes a diary she kept when she was 11, after she did the math: “I will have to wait a long time. . . . I don’t know if I will make it,” she wrote. She tells us that she then turned out the light to sleep, but turned it back on to add one more thought: “I want to go the farthest I can.” Looking back now, Biles writes, “that was the most important sentence I’ve ever written.”

Posthumorous:“The Princess Diarist,” Carrie Fisher’s book about working on the original Star Wars movie, didn’t make much noise when it was released in late November: It appeared for a single week on the combined nonfiction list, then faded. That all changes with Fisher’s death on Dec. 27 — this week, the book (based in large part on journals she kept at the time, when she was 19) catapults to No. 1 in its debut on the hardcover nonfiction list. Even as a teenager, Fisher was in possession of the ingenuous wit and raw honesty she later displayed in books like “Postcards From the Edge” and “Wishful Drinking.” The neuroses, too. “I would like to not be able to hear myself think,” she writes in one entry. “I constantly hear my mind chattering and jabbering away up there all by itself. . . . If anyone reads this when I have passed to the big bad beyond, I shall be posthumorously embarrassed. I shall spend my entire afterlife blushing.”

Networking: The title of Megyn Kelly’s memoir, “Settle for More,” comes from her personal motto. But it takes on added resonance with the recent announcement that Kelly will leave Fox News for a prominent gig at NBC. The book is No. 8 in its seventh week on the hardcover nonfiction list.